By submitting your personal information, you agree to receive emails regarding relevant products and special offers from TechTarget and its partners. You also agree that your personal information may be transferred and processed in the United States, and that you have read and agree to the Terms of Use and the Privacy Policy.

Can I incorporate manual tasks into a BPEL process?

The BPEL spec, at the moment, does not provide any built-in support for manual tasks. On the other hand, BPEL provides great support for asynchronous Web services, which allows manual tasks to be carried out with the use of a task service. Such a task service and the BPEL spec are 100% compatible. The task service can be provided by the BPEL engine vendor, a 3rd-party package or even implemented by the end-user. Without a task service, human intervention in processes has to be coded in a one-off manner. Customers are typically given the choice which option fits their needs best.

The advantage of using a task service out of the box is its ease of use and clean integration with the BPEL spec today. A task can carry standard properties, such as creator, assignee, duration, etc, as well as support arbitrary data as a payload. Customers who opt to port their applications to another BPEL platform, can either (1) Implement their own task service with the same API (the task service publishes a WSDL like any other Web service), (2) continue using the task service as a legacy, yet fully interoperable Web service, on the original BPEL engine, or (3) Modify their processes to not use the task service.

The following BPEL code example shows how to define a user task as part of a process with a task service:

0 comments

E-Mail

Username / Password

Password

By submitting you agree to receive email from TechTarget and its partners. If you reside outside of the United States, you consent to having your personal data transferred to and processed in the United States. Privacy